Some thoughts on architecture and understanding big systems. If you can’t fit it all in your head, you don’t get it. We need tools to capture specifications and running systems more succinctly.

I’d like diagnostic and instrumentation tools that capture data like a modern factory’s control systems. I’d love to be able to drill down from a high level overview of the system to the operations of a single component, such as looking at a particular Kafka’s consumer group size.